


The Woman in the Tweed Coat

by bakedgarnet



Category: Incredibles (Pixar Movies)
Genre: F/F, Hevelyn - Freeform, coffee shop AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-09-15 01:15:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16923840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bakedgarnet/pseuds/bakedgarnet
Summary: In which Helen is engaged and isn't sure if she wants to be, but finds her infatuation with a stranger in a coffee shop taking her mind off of that.orThe Hevelyn coffee shop AU that no one asked for.





	1. Chapter 1

The lunch rush was never a large part of Helen Truax’s day. She’d take the stairs down two floors from her yoga studio and stand in the long, winding line that typically trailed all the way out the door from the family-owned cafe. She’d order the same thing most of the time, a chai tea latte— hot in the winter and iced in the warmer seasons— and then retreat back up to her studio to set up for the next class. It was monotonous, sure, but she thrived in it.

 

Helen loved simplicity more than most would expect from a twenty-three year old, especially her. Honestly, she shocked herself with how much she sought out the incomplex. Her fiancé was enough excitement between the both of them, and honestly, she let him have his glory days without too much fight. He was three months away from becoming co-CEO of Insuricare, and the perks that would come alongside that promotion would support them through the nose.

 

Sometimes she wondered how much different she would be if she were extraordinary in some way that she was proud of. She spent so much of her life trying to prove herself to her father that her mother’s preachings of taking care of her wellbeing first went mostly out of the window. She knew that she wasn’t special— and maybe that was what made it so easy for her to believe her dad when he stressed the importance of finding a successful man to latch onto. Fear of inadequacy and failure were both a hell of a drug, this much she knew.

 

But she had Bob, Bob who was charming and protective of her, who was a popular jock in college, and who was on his way to running with the big dogs.

 

This was what she should have wanted, according to her father. Sometimes, though, Helen wished she had listened to her mom instead.

 

Helen was ten years old when her mother gave her the talk. It wasn’t about sex, no, just about men in general. She dressed the conversation up as some large reveal, a secret only allotted to the very special.

 

She looked Helen in the eyes with her own deep brown ones, wrinkled at the corners, and said in her familiar southern drawl, “Baby girl, there’s gonna be a lotta men after you when you’re not too much older. They’re gonna want to take what’s here,” she reached forward and cupped both of her youth fully round cheeks, “and break it down until it is nothin’ but bones that they can dress up and own for themselves.”

 

She said this all with confidence that scared Helen, but she listened with rapt attention because this was her mother, and her mother was never wrong.

 

“Don’t you let them. The only thing I want for you as my child is your freedom, sweetheart.”

 

Those words still haunted Helen every time she looked into Bob’s cool blue eyes. She felt free, but she had a nagging suspicion that this wasn’t what Veronica Truax had meant all those years ago. Helen had gotten engaged to her father— in the sense that Bob was also a working man dedicated to the greatness that came with success, who would do whatever it took to seize the top and set himself apart from mediocrity— and her mother looked at her when she found out with eyes that buried her disappointment so deep it radiated from the _core_ of her.

 

But John Truax would have never allowed Veronica to ruin the evening spent around glasses of expensive wine for the ladies and scotch for the gentlemen, and so Helen’s mother kept her mouth shut.

 

That was around the time that Helen finally understood. She had seen it all before, but only then did it call itself by its name.

 

Her stomach was queasy for the rest of the night.

 

Five months into the engagement, Helen got promoted herself to the head yoga instructor in the facility. She was proud of that achievement, even when Bob had shamelessly expressed that it didn’t matter because she wouldn’t be there for long anyway. Her call for celebration was met with the placating congratulations given to a child who has done something cute rather than anything of substance, and she saw her mother behind her eyelids every time she closed them.

* * *

The lunch rush was still a monotonous part of every day, but she started noticing someone there that she normally didn’t see. This woman was drawn tall and pulled taut when she ordered her drink, and Helen watched her sit down at a large table that had just cleared of its occupants and dump bags full of _stuff_ across the surface. Finally, she sat down, popped the cap off of her coffee, dumped half of whatever dark liquid was in her silver flask into the recyclable cup, and drained half of the mixture.

 

She was far less tense after that.

 

She paid no mind to the patrons of the cafe who shot her strange, semi-disapproving glances at the amount of space taken up, nor the absurd number of schematics and tools occupying their places in a sort of organized chaos around her. Helen stuck around a bit longer that first day to rubber neck, as one does, and found herself intrigued by the short haired stranger who mixed alcohol in her coffee, and used wearable magnifying glasses to work on something so minuscule no one could dream to figure out what it was.

 

She thought about that stranger even after she was wrapping up her last class of the day, and then again as she was laying down to sleep in an empty queen sized bed. Bob was working late again, and while Helen was sure he would be alright eating leftovers once more, something that nagged deep in the pit of her stomach told her she was letting him down— not carrying her weight.

 

She laid in bed and thought of her mother and father’s relationship when she was growing up in Georgia. Many times she had looked back on her childhood with fond memories, but more and more recently she was looking past that warm and inviting curtain of happy recollections, and instead looking at what she had _thought_ to be what she wanted for herself in a marriage when she grew up.

 

She had the gut feeling that she had missed quite a bit of her parents’ relationship growing up, and that knowledge made itself a home sour and thick at the back of her throat. She fell asleep with prickling behind her closed eyes, and tried to convince herself that, if she stopped thinking about it, eventually those feelings of doubt would pass.

* * *

Helen was wrong.

 

She had predicted that the strange woman sitting in the family owned coffee shop was a one time rarity, a fluke of timing that would never allow for them to cross paths again.

 

She was wrong, and she was so grateful for that fact.

 

She saw this strange woman again every day that she went down for her lunch break for two weeks, and in that time, she had also made herself start to take notice of just who else she had been in same space as every day. She imagined that it was unfortunate to coexist with so many people and never stop to even take note of their faces, so she made it a habit to people watch— though most of her watching was taken up by the tinkering woman at the giant wooden table.

 

There was a businessman with deep brown skin and graying dreadlocks that hung in a low ponytail to the center of his back who stood poised near the exit as he slowly sipped at his drink before dropping it into the nearby recycling bin and straightening his suit jacket before leaving the shop. He came in every day at 12:15PM on the dot, shortly after Helen would find herself entering.

 

There was a teenage girl who frequented the cafe in solitude, seemingly young enough to attend the large high school down the street that likely had off-campus lunch options. Helen found herself checking back to look at her every once in a while, her cool and put-together demeanor reminding her of the girls she envied herself in high school.

 

Pressure from her father to perform above her own capacity at the time had made her far too ridden with anxiety to make proper, long lasting friendships— let alone have the self-assured aloofness of being comfortable with herself in public or private places alike. Eventually, looking at the girl made her a bit too somber for her tastes, and she stopped watching all together.

 

“Hey, are you gonna order, or what?”

 

Helen glanced up immediately from where she had partially zoned out around the general area of the line. She was close enough to make people wonder if she was in it, but far enough away that she could just as likely not be.

 

That’s not what startled her though, it was the stranger— more specifically, it was the pretty, short-haired one who unabashedly tinkered in the cafe and who Helen couldn’t keep herself from thinking about no matter how weird she found it.

 

She had the subtle scent of expensive perfume, and her deep blue eyes were strikingly different from Bob’s. These had metal in them, a slightly off-putting hardness like they hadn’t shown warmth or the fleshy underbelly of softness in quite some time. The look alarmed her, and while her gaze continued to take in the other woman’s bags beneath her eyes and the absurdly nice tweed coat around her shoulders, she backed away immediately.

 

“No, I’m not in line. Sorry.”

 

“Mm,” the stranger hummed as she made her way around Helen’s frozen body to stand behind the patron ordering currently. Helen had to stop herself from turning around and staring— or worse, ask for her name— so she did the only thing she could think of in the moment. Not having ordered a single thing for lunch, she turned on her heel and exited the cafe into the tiled common space and went straight for the escalator that would take her one floor up to her studio.

 

Her cheeks shouldn’t have been flushed— it wasn’t as if she had sprinted up any steps— but they were, and Helen was ill-prepared to deduce a good reason other than the fact that she was simply embarrassed. That had to be it, she was embarrassed over a simple social faux-pas, one so simple it could hardly be called that without being overbearingly dramatic, but she called it such anyway.

 

Every time since then, Helen made weird eye contact with this woman across the cafe every time she was waiting in line. She hadn’t _meant_ to keep looking over in her direction. It was moreso that she wanted to check and see if this strange woman was looking back at her, and thus creating the illusion that Helen was the one with the staring problem.

 

If she was being honest with herself, though, she _was_ the one with the issue.

 

Thankfully, being honest with herself was something that Helen had yet to learn how to be— and thus, she reasoned that she was the one being looked at.

 

Nearly a week following their incident near the register, Helen decided to take matters into her own hands. She had spent too long dancing around the proper etiquette and rules for social interaction that told her the last thing she wanted to do was make this woman uncomfortable— but she felt now that she had a right to know what was just so damn fascinating about her person to garner so much attention.

 

Drawing herself up tall, she walked over to the large wooden table— long since collectively decided by the patrons that it belonged to this woman exclusively— and stopped with her arms crossed tightly across her torso. As if that would protect her from what she was about to do next.

 

“Excuse me, do you have a problem?” Helen asked.

 

Blue eyes slowly dragged themselves up from behind the magnifying glasses worn around her head, making her gaze look like pinpricks when she looked up to Helen. She reached up to pull them off of her face, revealing her tired visage and an eyebrow raised in both utter disbelief and confusion.

 

“Excuse me?” She asked, setting the wearable tool down to the surface of the table, and with it all of her other tools that Helen couldn’t have named had her life depended on it.

 

Deflating alarmingly fast, Helen decided to get it off of her chest before she lost her nerve entirely, “I noticed that you keep staring at me every time I come in here, and I wanted to know if there was a problem.”

 

Her voice was soft, too soft for the words that were said with it, and she cursed herself for wilting so easily beneath this stranger’s perplexed and annoyed gaze.

 

“If you’re referring to all the times I was looking _past_ you at that cheesecake in the display box that I’ve been craving for the past two weeks— don’t worry. No one’s looking at you, Red.”

 

Helen felt her face suffuse with heat at the idea that she might be wrong, and she pursed her lips against whatever choice words she had been planning and thinking of in the brief moments she had been talking herself into confronting the woman in the first place.

 

“Oh, um… I’m so sorry to have assumed—“

 

“Don’t worry about it,” the woman murmured, already reaching back for her glasses and fitting them over her head once more. Helen lingered at her side for a moment longer than what was necessary, wanting to apologize again or explain herself in a way that would make this complete stranger think of her as less of an asshole.

 

She figured she had already pushed her luck for the day, and instead took her chai tea latte and went back upstairs to her yoga studio.

* * *

Bob got his promotion within the month instead of three, and looked at Helen as if she were missing one too many screws when she mentioned wanting to keep her job.

 

“I just don’t understand why you would keep working there when I’m finally going to be making enough to support the both of us,” he sighed, sitting down beside her on the couch and looking at her with cool blue eyes that were starting to make her chest hurt.

 

“Because, Bob, I _like_ working— I like my _job_! I don’t wanna sit around at home all day and be a housewife like my mother.”

 

That was the first time she had ever admitted it out loud, and also the first time that Bob had flinched back from her as if she had insulted him.

 

“What do you think I worked my ass off for, honey? Do you think I kissed asses at Insuricare and busted my balls every morning from nine to five so that my wife could _work_ ? I did this for you, Helen! For _us_! I want to be a good husband, isn’t that what you want?”

 

God, and when Bob said it like that, Helen had half a mind to think that her mother had no idea what the hell she was talking about. He just wanted to take care of her, was that a bad thing?

 

A nagging voice in the back of her head asked her what happened when it was time to settle the debt she owed him for doing as such, and the possibilities made her queasy.

 

If she stopped to think about it, it was exactly how her mother got roped into being the kept-thing, seen and not heard, there to decorate, and fuck, and bear a child, and raise her the way her father said he wanted her raised.

 

“Bob, I want to be happy,” she murmured much quieter than before.

 

“Do I not make you happy, Hel?” His hand was warm on her knee, and she remembered a time when that used to make her stomach flip with butterflies.

 

Naturally, perhaps guiltily, Helen reassured him, "Of course you do."

 

But she also realized, maybe for the first time, that her answer was a lie.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Helen quits her job, apologizes to a stranger, and continues to have doubts about Bob.

The two weeks following the notice of her impending release from SuperCore Yoga, Helen went through the arduous task of announcing the news the her final class. Throughout the day, she had given the emotionally draining task of saying goodbye to people she had come to genuinely enjoyed seeing every time she went into work. The new faces and the familiar ones alike were ones that she would miss dearly. She was met with sweaty and grateful hugs from each and every person before the walked out of the studio door, and out of her life.

 

Helen thought about the woman whose gaze she had actively been avoiding each time since their last meeting. She also avoided her by only getting her ceasar wrap and immediately leaving to go back upstairs. After a short moment of a guiltily turning stomach and indecisiveness, Helen stopped at the cafe afterward to make one last thing right before she was gone for good. She ordered one plain slice of cheesecake from the menu and nothing else, standing off to the side and waiting for it to be cut and placed onto one of the ceramic plates given to patrons. When she picked up the dessert from the end of the counter, she took a deep breath and made her way to that ever-occupied wooden table.

 

She slowly guided the plate down until it sat among all of the technology and parts used in whatever it was the woman was building. It clanked quietly and drew her attention. Her enigmatic blue eyes took in the dessert, widening just slightly before they squinted down at it and then up at her.

 

She was without her goggles today.

 

“Hi, ah, I wanted to apologize for before. I worked upstairs, but today was my last day… I wanted to say sorry since I probably won’t see you around again.”

 

The expressionless face of the woman sitting before her softened just a bit around the edges, just enough that Helen was almost positive she was imagining it all. She watched her carefully to see if her apology would be well-received, but she was so closed off that it was impossible to tell.

 

Finally, she put down the mini screwdriver in her hand and pulled the plate and the accompanying fork closer to herself. Her full lips drew themselves into a tiny smile, one that was surprisingly shy considering her relatively icy demeanor. Something unfamiliar warmed Helen’s stomach.

 

The stranger was opening her mouth to say something, perhaps thank her for the cheesecake or accept Helen’s apology, but she was cut off by a man’s voice ringing out from near the entrance.

 

“Evelyn! God damn it, I knew you weren’t going down to the lobby for lunch like you said. You have forever to work on the chip, would you take care of yourself for once? Eat something?”

 

A tall, young, and sharp nosed man with blindingly white teeth and chestnut colored hair walked up to the two of them in a navy blue suit. It looked more expensive than Bob’s monthly salary. He exuded power, and commanded attention as soon as he entered the cafe.

 

The stranger, Evelyn, rolled her pale blue eyes and slumped her shoulders down toward the surface of the table while her head dropped to the side. She looked up at him with annoyance darkening her expression.

 

“Winston,” she sighed, “would you just— you know what? What makes you think I haven’t eaten while I was here?” She asked indignantly, gesturing toward the plate of cheesecake with raised brows and an increasingly agitated expression.

 

The two were drawing the attention of several patrons around them, and Helen suddenly felt the urge to step away from what was obviously a tense moment between… lovers? Close friends? Before she could, though, Evelyn was turning back to face her with an apologetic half-smile and wryly lidded eyes.

 

“Thanks for the cheesecake. I have to confess, though—“

 

“ _Evelyn_!” The man urged a bit louder than before, jolting the enigma of a woman out of whatever she was going to say to Helen and making her whirl around to face him with a deep scowl.

 

“ _Don’t_ _start_ with me, Winston. I’m coming,” she growled as he got closer, and she hastily shoved her things into the several bags she had walked into the cafe with. Metal clanked against each other inside of the backpacks and canvas bags. She didn’t even look back at Helen as she was escorted from the establishment by a skyscraper of a man who only had several inches on her.

 

Helen chuckled to herself a bit when she realized that she had taken the cheesecake with her, the cafe-owned plate and silverware with it. Looking back down at where she had been sitting, she noticed the black and white tweed coat left draped over the back the seat. She picked it up, clenched in a single fist, to run it out toward the mysterious woman— only to find her and her male companion gone.

* * *

Helen returned home on the train with the coat draped over her lap and a pensive expression on her face. She rubbed her fingers up and down the material, brows drawn as she considered just the brief encounter she’d had with Evelyn that day.

 

The look of surprise and, Helen would even venture to say _gratefulness_ , that etched across her face at the act of apology made her heart stutter. She was being ridiculous, she knew. These feelings were entirely baseless. She had just learned the woman’s name that day, and even then it hadn’t been from Evelyn’s own mouth. The had hardly spoken enough words to each other to even classify their relationship as acquaintances. That logic did nothing, though, to quell the infatuation steadily growing inside of her.

 

Bottom lip tucked between her teeth, Helen held the coat close to herself as she stepped inside and locked the door shut. The idea of holding onto what was so clearly an expensive coat over the weekend made her paranoid, especially because she had every intention of going back to return it in mint condition. She was just being a decent human being, is what she told herself. Not that she possibly, really, wanted to see Evelyn again. Absolutely not that.

 

Helen worked— used to work— on the weekends, so she knew that Evelyn was never there then. There could be an even slimmer chance that she would show up on even on Monday with the way things went between her and whoever that man was. They looked similar enough, she supposed. Maybe he was her brother after all. That thought gave her a bit more comfort than the idea that he was romantically involved with Evelyn, and there was no way that Helen wanted to unpack the reasoning behind _that_ without at least a glass of wine in her hand first.

 

Regardless, she figured that it would be safest to hang it up in her and Bob’s shared closet. The last thing she wanted to have to do was buy out the entire bakery as an apology for ruining a coat that probably cost more than Helen made in months.

 

The thought of her salary, or what used to be her salary, drew her head right back to something that had been dampening every thought at the back of her mind since she had left for the train.

 

She was jobless, now. Her place to go and exist peacefully among others who were as invested in the union between body and mind as she was no longer belonged to her. She made use of herself there, leading groups of people she had come to see as a community into better, more well-rounded health. She was _earning her keep_ , as her mother had always secretly encouraged her to do. Around her father, her mother tended to put on the mask where she told Helen to find a man to do all of that hard work for her.

 

It was all for nothing now that she had given it up to make her fiance happy. She was a floating balloon trapped up against a low ceiling. Nothing to strive for, and nothing to do but wait for someone to pull her in whatever direction they pleased.

  


Bob was going to take care of her, and everything she had ever learned growing up told her that she should be grateful. They were going to have kids, and her new version of ‘earning her keep’ was going to be tending to them. That’s where she would get her deep satisfaction of meaning of contribution from, if what her family had always told her was true.

 

She was starting to doubt that it was.

 

With a heavy swallow, she shook her head free of those troubling thoughts and pushed a hanger through the shoulders of Evelyn’s coat. The expensive perfume wafted into her nostrils as she did so, and without thinking, she brought the collar up to her nose and inhaled deeply. The calm and comfort that it brought to her tense shoulders was something that she didn’t have the wherewithal to think too deeply about. After a long moment, she realized what she was doing and quickly went about hanging the coat up and shutting the closet door without any more self-declared strange, obsessive behaviors.

 

When Bob got home, Helen was attempting to stay awake on the couch. She had been flipping back and forth through shows on Netflix and eventually stopped on something brainless to entertain herself with after dinner. She had long since eaten, having been expecting Bob at six and getting too hungry to wait for him at around eight. He strolled in at 10:37PM smelling of cigars and beer.

 

“Hey honey, what are you still doing up?” He asked, voice far too loud for the otherwise low volume of the house.

 

“....was waiting for you,” she murmured sleepily, sitting up straight from where her cheek had been droopily resting in her palm, “I made dinner. ‘S cold by now, but you can heat it up fine.”

 

A look of regret passed across Bob’s face, and he stepped further into the living room while removing his coat to press a kiss to her forehead.

 

“Sorry I’m late, I got invited out with Tim and the guys, and it was my chance to talk up the boys upstairs. You understand, don’t you? It’s all a part of this new position.”

 

Helen was already turning the television off and gathering herself up from the couch to head to their bedroom.

 

“Of course, sweetie,” she sighed, “No worries. I’m going to bed.” She trudged barefoot across the hardwood floor without looking back at her fiancé.

 

“Goodnight, honey!”

 

“Night.”

* * *

Saturday and Sunday passed with little fanfare. Helen thought at least that she and Bob would be able to spend more time together now that she didn’t have to work, but he was invited out again to go do lord knew what with his new coworkers— and Helen had seen him a grand total of two times the entire weekend. She tried not to let the bitterness build up in the back of her throat, but she couldn’t help the flames of resentment that licked at her stomach and begged it to burn like being snubbed did. By Sunday night, when she was laying down in bed alone because Bob was still out with _the guys_ , she remembered with a spark of excitement in her gut that she would get to return Evelyn’s coat to her tomorrow.

 

The phantom scent of Evelyn’s perfume, or moreso how it made her feel, made an appearance and stirred something deep inside of her that hadn’t been touched in far too long.

 

She closed her eyes in the darkness of her room and allowed her mind to drift, conjuring what it pleased as she tried to fall asleep. In some vague, half-awake dream, the source of the scent was directly behind her, snaking itself around her waist and whispering something unintelligible at the nape of her neck. A shiver wracked through her body, and the need to be touched or held or _something_ hit her like a full body fever.

 

As she tried clench her eyes shut and force herself to fall asleep and escape those thoughts, she was bombarded by mental images of that elusive woman, Evelyn, brushing her hair from the back of her neck to place her full lips down against the skin—

 

Helen groaned loudly and sat up in bed with a speed that jarred her. She pressed her palms into her eyes and sighed, resigning herself to curling up facing the opposite way and trying to silence her brain enough to rest.

 

When she woke up in the morning, she was surprised to feel a bulky arm around her midsection. Bob had been a stereotypical jock back in college, number 47 on the university’s football team, not the quarterback but good enough to be if the opportunity had ever presented itself. He was a large man, a bit fluffier now that he had stopped hitting the gym every day, but a good percentage of him was still solid muscle.

 

She knew that arm— and she hadn’t woken up or fallen asleep to it entrapping her in at least a month.  

 

She’d missed being cuddled into him like this, and she felt her breathing relax as she pressed her back against the soft, yet firm, outline of Bob’s torso. Blinking her eyes open for a quick moment revealed that the clock read 10:48AM, and she jolted up so quickly that she woke Bob up. He jumped with surprise as well, murmuring nonsense as he tried to figure out what had yanked him out of his slumber so suddenly.

 

“Bob,” she shook his shoulder, “Bob, you’re _late_!”

 

“Mmm… wha..? No I’m not,” he sighed as he shifted himself back down beneath the duvet. He tried to wrap his arm back around her waist to pull her back down beside him, but she resisted.

 

“It’s almost eleven, you were supposed to be at work by nine!”

 

Her heart hammered in her chest for him, knowing how important his job was to him and seeming to understand a gravity to the situation that he had yet to pick up on.

 

“No, honey, I called off today,” he mumbled sleepily, “now come lay back down with me, please?”

 

He spoke with his eyes closed, the only signs of expression on his face showing through the movements of his lips and eyebrows. Helen warily climbed back into his arms and allowed herself to relax beneath the duvet again. She was on the verge of asking him what had caused him to take off of work suddenly, he never did so, but then soft snores were coming from deep in his chest again and she let the query go.

 

She’d ask him later.

 

When Helen awoke the second time, not even remembering falling asleep encapsulated in Bob’s arms, her eyes fluttered open to glance at the clock again and it read 12:07PM in green lighting. She thought nothing of it at first, and then froze when the vision of Evelyn came to mind, Evelyn with one heeled booted foot up on the chair, the other dangling off the front, and her hair flopped over face as she worked tediously at some tiny little microchip.

 

She was never sure of what time the other woman actually _left_ her lunch break, Helen was never in the coffee shop long enough to see her enter _and_ exit, but the sudden desire she had to get up and get down there was overwhelming. After contemplating how to get from beneath Bob’s arm, she began to think about something else.

 

She had wanted nothing more than for Bob to take a break from work for once and spend time with her. She hadn’t been cuddled in too long, touch starved in the worst way. She had exactly what she had always wanted— and now she was going to run away from it to go return a coat to a stranger?

 

A gorgeous and mysterious stranger, sure, but a stranger nonetheless.

 

She had everything she would have wanted in that moment, and so she closed her eyes, turned around until her face was buried in the firm plane of Bob’s chest, and went back to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have the majority of this written already, but I'm not happy with how a lot of it came out (I forget how to write when I'm at school I guess lmao) so I'm in the process of revising. Thanks for your patience, and for reading, and much love to all of you!
> 
> Happy holidays!
> 
> (Come find me on twitter/tumblr: @bakedgarnet)


	3. The Return

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Helen finally brings herself to return the coat, and Evelyn leaves her speechless.

It was Tuesday when Helen finally gathered herself out of an empty bed and into a scalding-hot shower with every intention to finally return to the coffee shop. She didn’t want to consider her true motivations for going to return this coat, and so instead she mentally declared it as an act of kindness for an intriguing stranger. The guilt that sat thick and cloying at the pit of her stomach was nothing more than nervousness, and this is how she lied to herself. Evelyn was an intimidating woman, after all, it was not much of a stretch. 

 

Her ride on the train with the tweed coat laid across her lap was an anxious one, her mind whirring with fantasies that ended in both joy and disaster. Her fingers brushed back and forth across the material of the garment absently as her thoughts swirled, and the underlying scent of perfume that came from the cloth had become so familiar that it was hardly even distracting anymore. 

 

The rushing sound of the train on the tracks buzzed in her ears, sending subtle vibrations throughout her body. Her car was both full and not, enough bodies to take up most seats, but not enough to crowd. The track went around a bend, and she looked out above the empty seat across from her to watch the bright city move rapidly past the thick window. 

 

Helen was slowly realizing that she romanticized Evelyn in a dangerous way, seeing their lives play out like every fantasy and desire she had ever projected onto a perfect outsider, a blank page to rewrite everything she had ever found wrong in Bob.

 

She tried once more not to think about how many things there were, and for how long she had secretly been holding on to them with cold, bitter hands.

 

The day before had been lovely enough, sure, spent cuddled in each other’s arms and catching up on shows that they had binged together long before he got too busy and tired to stay up with her as of late. She had been kind enough not to continue without him, but she realized that she had willingly gone almost a year without watching several of her favorite shows because Bob couldn’t— or wouldn’t— set aside time to watch them with her anymore.

 

She tried not to think too much about that, either.

 

She had made them lunch and dinner, and that was a welcomed change of pace, but when they laid down to go to bed, things got a bit dicey. Helen had been burrowed beneath the comforter with her face nuzzled into her memory-foam pillow when Bob’s hand started to wander. He began with caressing her ass, and she wanted to want him so badly it broke her heart.

 

Because then his lips were on her neck, and his hand was between her legs. His fingers were too thick to be the ones she found herself trying to think of instead, the ones dexterous enough to build a microchip for artificial intelligence, and the guilt hit her so acutely that she pulled away for the night. 

 

This left Bob going to sleep agitated and with his back to her, and Helen staying up until three in the morning staring at the ceiling. She had wished that a hole in the floor would open up as big as the one in her chest and swallow her.

 

But she didn’t want to think about yesterday anymore.

 

The train was pulling up to her stop, and she gathered the coat that still smelled so much like Evelyn it was practically like walking beside her, and got off onto the platform with thoughts that still raced a million miles a minute. 

 

The frigid walk down the street toward the building in which she used to work was slower than usual. She could imagine that it was because this time she was not doing a frantic half-walk half-jog toward the entrance as she usually did. She supposed that the only upside of no longer working at the yoga studio was no longer having to stress out over the haphazard travel time on public transportation. She rarely ended up actually being late, but she had felt that she was rushing more often than not. 

 

This time, though, she got to walk at a normal pace toward the tall, holiday decorated doors while burrowed into the fluffy, cream scarf around her neck. 

 

Evelyn’s coat was clutched tightly to her body as she made her way inside the warmth of the building. Helen went directly to the family owned coffee shop as she had been anticipating doing for days. With a deep breath, and with her free hand unzipping her own coat to adjust to the warmer temperature, she entered through with a newly added chime following her push of the door. No one looked up at her entrance, the music was loud enough that it wasn’t disrupted, and no one had any reason to be looking for her in the first place.

 

But then her eyes landed on that long wooden table, and her heart swelled until it blocked her next breath from travelling down her airway. Evelyn sat there, a white suede coat hung over the back of her seat, and those magnifying goggles over her eyes just as they had always been. Tiny sets of tools were at her disposal, and one was in between dexterous fingers working ever so carefully at the device in front of her as if nothing at all had changed. 

 

Helen stood there gaping for far too long before realizing that she was being  _ weird _ . Evelyn was just a stranger, one with whom she had some bizarre fascination, but a stranger nonetheless. She slowly walked forward until she was standing beside the other woman’s chair and waited to gain her attention, but it didn’t come. She was far too focused on the task in front of her. Instead, Helen chewed her bottom lip between her teeth and tapped on the other woman’s shoulder twice before retracting her digits and pulling them back up to join her other hand in holding the tweed coat. 

 

Covered eyes looked up immediately, and the only hint at an expression on Evelyn’s face was the parting of her full lips. Her eyes were hidden behind the glasses at first, but then she put her tool down and reached up to remove them so that cold blue eyes could stare, lidded and intrigued, up at her. A bemused smile tugged at the corners of her lips as her brows scrunched a bit.

 

“Oh… hey,” she said politely. Her eyes dropped down to look at the coat tucked up in Helen’s arms, and her parted lips widened until they were in a shocked ‘O.’ 

 

“Well, I’ll be damned. You had it.”

 

Helen felt her face warm as she realized she hadn’t prepared exactly what she was going to say. The last thing that she needed was for this woman to think she had stolen her jacket on purpose— though the reason why she would bring it back if that were the case was one she had yet to take into consideration.

 

“You ran out last time I saw you and left it on the chair… I tried to take it out to you, but you and the guy you were with were already gone,” she explained sheepishly.

 

Evelyn rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, leaning back in her seat dangerously far until the front two legs were off of the ground. She rocked back and forth that way for the rest of the time that she spoke.

 

“Winston,” she growled under her breath, “Sorry he interrupted us, I appreciated the cheesecake. Though, what I had meant to tell you,” Evelyn chuckled a bit to herself with some strange mixture of embarrassment and amusement at what Helen assumed to be what she was going to say next, “was that I might’ve… lied a bit about what I had been staring at before.” 

 

The way that she said it, with her eyes flicking up to dig deeply into Helen’s, that wry smile on her pretty lips, head turned to the side to face her, but also forward to give the illusion of undivided attention—

 

Helen swallowed and opened her mouth to respond, but quickly realized she had nothing to respond with. No words were available to rise from her throat and spill from her lips with half of the allure or confidence that radiated off of Evelyn like she bathed in it. And with nothing to say to match the way that Evelyn made her heart thud and the pit of her stomach ache, she said nothing at all. 

 

Evelyn continued to stare her down as she reached forward and held her hand out for Helen to return her coat. After a brief moment of fogginess, she did so, laying the tweed material over the other woman’s pale hand, and not knowing what to do with her own once they were empty.

 

A large part of her wanted to be running her fingers through the floppy, chestnut colored, short tresses upon Evelyn’s head, but if she didn’t put a cap on those thoughts immediately, she had no idea what she was liable to say. The last thing that she needed was to sabotage this moment that could make or break whatever future relationship they could have together— as friends, she meant.

 

Half of Helen wanted her to cut this short, to get out of the cafe and out from in front of Evelyn’s gaze before she did something, or said something, she would regret. The other half of her wanted to sit down at this table claimed by such a brilliant engineer, and ask all of the questions that had been bogging down her brain since they first met.

 

“What  _ were _ you looking at?” Helen asked finally, her words hardly a whisper and possibly only audible at all because the music playing softly in the background was in the middle of transitioning into another song, and it was briefly quiet enough to allow for that pocket of silence. 

 

Evelyn tilted her head to the side and down a bit, one eyebrow raising in disbelief while her hands held her steady on the edge of the tabletop.

 

“Uh,” she laughed a bit, “you? Didn’t peg you for the oblivious type, but I guess we all have our flaws.” 

 

The grin on her face as she said the last part took the sting out of her words, and Helen wanted to touch the back of her hands to her cheeks to see if they were truly as hot as she thought they were. 

 

It was too hard not to feel scandalous when staring into the flirtatious eyes of a stranger whom she had just fantasized about instead of being present beneath the hands of her fiance the night before. 

 

“I didn’t want to assume.”

 

“Don’t worry about it... ” Evelyn tilted her head up, suggesting suddenly, “sit with me.”

 

Helen’s hands felt clammy at her sides, and she paused for a long moment before beginning to shrug her coat off and take the seat across from the woman whose eyes followed her every movement with a patient calmness that made her stomach twist. 

 

“What’s your name again?”

 

“H-” Her voice got stuck in her throat with anticipation, something stifling and damp, “Helen.”

 

She watched Evelyn’s lips pull back into an intrigued grin, those full lips painted a red so deep it was nearly purple. They somehow added to the uniqueness of her face, all ninety-degree angles and a jawline that Helen ached to prick her fingers on. Her brows were thin, but not too thin, quirked in a way that made Helen feel scrutinized, but in the way that an art piece would in front of a potential buyer.

 

“A lit torch— the bright one,” Evelyn murmured speculatively to herself, “Pretty.”

 

Helen sat stiff-backed in her seat, hands folded atop the table like she was sitting down for a job interview. Her coat was slung over the back of her chair, and she watched as Evelyn gently sat her tweed one across the seat beside herself.  

 

“Thank you,” Helen said, a bit of surprise at the compliment in her tone. “No one’s ever known the meaning of my name before. I never even think twice about it.”

 

Evelyn slipped her goggles back down over her face and picked up the tiny tool she has been using before once again, going back to work on the minuscule device while continuing the conversation as well.

 

“One of my favorite stories as a child was The Legend of Helen of Troy,” Evelyn didn’t glance up, but she was surely smiling as she continued. “Don’t ask why a seven year old was that deep into Greek mythology— the answer is exactly as nerdy as you’d expect.”

 

Helen found herself laughing, and some of the tightness in her limbs loosened up, her shoulders dropping from where they had been tensed around her neck. She watched Evelyn move her hands with confidence and speed, prompting her to finally ask:

 

“So why do you work here in public? I’m sure there are better places to focus on your…” her hands gestured vaguely as she tried to guess exactly what it was Evelyn was working on. She recalled hearing someone mention an AI, but didn’t want to misname it in front of the genius herself and end up embarrassed.

 

“Implantable Artificial Intelligence chip,” Evelyn murmured distractedly as her face scrunched in particular concentration on a certain part, “and I work here because my brother keeps kicking me out of my lab to take care of myself by getting lunch, or whatever—“ Evelyn paused for a second to look up at Helen through her magnification glasses, “that’s why he stormed in here the last time I saw you. He caught me just doing more work instead of taking time off.”

 

Suddenly, the interaction with the strange man made complete sense upon hearing that, and the relief that flooded through Helen now that she knew that the man was Evelyn’s brother was also one to ponder at a different time.

 

“I’m surprised he trusted you not to come back here after last time,” Helen murmured eventually.

 

Evelyn snorted, “Yeah, like he has any idea where I am. Not that he’s not smart enough to check the same place twice, but he’s a busy guy. I doubt he’ll be coming back soon.”

 

Helen hummed for lack of anything else to say and found her gaze wandering down to her hands clenched together atop the table. She chewed at the inside of her lower lip as she wracked her brain for anything to continue the conversation, but came up horrifyingly short. Before she could panic though, Evelyn was speaking once more.

 

“Hungry?”

 

Helen’s eyes shot back up, brows reaching toward her hairline at the question, “Well,” she started, remembering that she hadn’t actually eaten anything yet, “sure. A bit.”

 

At her confirmation, Evelyn pushed the glasses off of her face all together and set them carefully upon the table top, “What are you in the mood for?”

 

“...Huh?” Helen asked, dumbfounded and taking the question a different place than it had been intended.

 

“You’re hungry, what do you want?”

 

Helen grasped at nothing for a long moment, her brain trying to rationalize the idea that this enigma of a woman was offering to buy her lunch when she had no reason to at all. The random act of generosity, or maybe if the flicker behind her gaze meant anything,  _ flirtation,  _ had taken her so far off guard that she froze.

 

“...How ‘bout a sandwich?” Evelyn offered eventually, her words hesitant as she seemed to be worrying over Helen’s blank stare.

 

“Y-Yeah, sure. Thank you,” Helen finally got out, clenching and unclenching her hands on the table top a few times before flattening them down to the wood entirely.

 

“Any particular kind?”

 

“Surprise me,” Helen nodded once, pleased with having found her voice. She watched as Evelyn dug into her purse atop the table for her wallet and gripped the leather item in her right hand, the pinky and index fingers decorated with two thin, silver rings around each.

 

She didn’t want to think about Evelyn’s fingers because of how much she knew that she  _ wanted _ to think about Evelyn’s fingers.

 

“Watch my stuff,” the other woman threw behind her shoulder as she sauntered off, and then she was standing in line beside the counter and Helen was trying not to stare too intently.

 

She was guilty, and of what? Her thoughts? She couldn’t control those as much as she wanted to, and Bob didn’t need to know about this strange phase of fantasy she was indulging in with this woman. As if he had never fantasized about other women— she told herself this to feel better, but at least she knew that about him already as a fact.

 

When Evelyn returned, she was moving a bit more quickly than before, and dropped the pristinely wrapped sandwich down in front of Helen before hurriedly moving to pack all of her numerous objects up from the table.

 

“Wha— where are you going?” Helen asked.

 

“Winston just sent me a text, he needs me back at the office,” Evelyn rolled her eyes, “Some investors are coming by and they’d like to speak with both of us instead of just him. Sorry about this,” she said as she shoved all of her things into several cloth bags and threw her arms into her white suede coat before piling the bags up to her shoulders.

 

“Investors? Where do you work?”

 

“DevTech, sorry, hi, I’m Evelyn Deavor,” she paused in all of her frantic motions and held her hand out for Helen to shake.

 

Helen took it slowly, blinking twice and opening and closing her mouth several more times.

 

_ Evelyn Deavor _ , that name sounded far too familiar. She would look into it later.

 

“Nice to meet you too… good luck with your investors!” She called out, as Evelyn was already retreating, toting all of her bags and her tweed coat as soon as she retracted her hand.

 

“Thanks, Helen of Troy,” Evelyn called back without turning around, one partially free hand shooting to the sky to wave once above her head as she went.

 

Helen looked down at her sandwich and unwrapped the foil.

 

It was one of her favorites, minus the tomatoes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy 2019! Come talk to me on Tumblr/twitter, or support me on ko-fi (early/unreleased content!) @bakedgarnet :)

**Author's Note:**

> Hello loves, I'm making my way back into writing with this little fic. There will probably be six chapters maximum (probably also of varying lengths). The first three and a half are already finished, and I can't wait to share this with you and jump back into Professional Work over winter break! Hope you enjoy the ride, and thanks for reading!
> 
> (come find me on tumblr and/or twitter: bakedgarnet)
> 
> Much love!


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